Watching parents fail

I had a difficult phone call with my dad last night. Usually it's my mom that I get more concerned about (when she's spiraling down into depression and anxiety, despite her medication), but this time it seems that my dad has gotten himself into another impossibly difficult situation where he's getting burned. Again. I can't count how many times this has happened to him--and he gets so angry, and pushes me away when I want to try and understand what's going on. I understand his reaction, but it's still disturbing when he treats me that way. He isn't thinking outside of his own head at those times, I know that.

It's such an upside-down feeling to watch your own parents fail, over and over again. Financially, relationally, emotionally, socially... it seems that the older they get (and the more estranged they get from others--they themselves have been split up for 13 years now, and neither of them have very many friends--just a loyal sibling or two, and then me), the more they seem to stumble over themselves. And it has not been for lack of opportunity. It has been poor decision-making accompanied by bad luck, along the way. The older I get, the more I see this. Thank goodness they are both in somewhat decent health, though I don't know how long that's going to last, given their lifestyles.

I don't really pity them, but I still feel bad for them somehow. I wish I could make things easier for them, but their lives have always been more messy than I could comprehend. I think that when I got both of them to convert to Christianity (in my evangelical teens--they were both non-religious), it was my attempt to "save" them. But that didn't work--when I walked away from the faith, they let themselves slide, too. Again, all upside-down.

Both of them struggle with emotional dysregulation, anger management, mood disorders, spontaneous decision-making and risky behavior, and either an overblown sense of entitlement/victimization (my mother) or a overextended desire to help others (my dad), which usually gets taken advantage of by people he should never have tried to help in the first place. You can see what a nice, healthy relationship they must have had for those 17 years together. Both of them suffer from extremely poor self-esteem, in their own ways, and that has always been the center of their dysfunction. And yet, they raised me, somehow. They tried their damndest not to fuck me up, despite themselves. And I'm grateful for that, for many things that they gave me. But it all feels so long ago now, back when "we" were a family. It's all become quite foggy in my brain, the way things used to be.

So, yeah. Ktsp and I are moving back to Seattle in a month, exactly. Both of my parents will be within a 30 mile radius. I'm not as worried about my dad, but wondering if I should be, given that he seems so much more prone to anger than he used to be. Sometimes I think I actually feel more secure around my mom (despite her issues), because at least her mood swings are predictable and not in the form of angry outbursts. That's a new feeling for me.

And, in the midst of all this, I sit in Iceland and sometimes wonder what my real father was like, and whether anything would have turned out differently if he had lived. I don't think it would have, to be honest. It will never be more than a parlor question, an "Oh, hmm..." thought. What a strange hand of cards this all is.